De l'autre côté de minuit

During the summer of '77, I didn't get to see as many movies as I had been used to seeing the past three years. The only other movie I saw that summer was "Star Wars."

So here I am, 17 years old, and I go to this with my Grandmother and an aunt, cause, lets face it, this is what is a classic 'chick flick'. I dislike that expression cause it makes it seem like you have to be a woman to gain any enjoyment, and the only movie I'd personally attach that label to is "Thelma and Louise." Just cause the main character of a movie is a woman does not mean its not about a human being who is completely unbelievable.

Anywho, I saw this again last week, and it may as well be 900 years old. They don't make trash like this anymore, but maybe that's because they don't write trash novels anymore. Gone are Harold Robbins, Jackie Susann and the author of this, Sidney Sheldon. We have Jackie Collins, but her stuff ends up on television (I think). Why has the world given up on the trash novel, the one you read on the beach or on a plane?

This has it all, like the master checklist..epic length, betrayal, a lot of over- and under-acting, revenge, nudity, sex, self-abortion, international settings, a trial, an actress, a firing squad, a bitch, a virgin, a colorless leading man and even a surprise ending. 8/10.

What a success this film was in Australia in 1977.... it ran for months gathering momentum among shop assistants and daytime single women ticket-buyers as a much whispered about 'must see'. well for us fellers, it was a bit raunchy showing off Gallic nubile sexiness among the ruins of Paris in WW2. I guess it also caused the rise of the miniseries movie potboiler drama that paved the way for THE BETSY, THE Greek TYCOON and many other 2hr plus glossy romantic efforts.... most long forgotten. TV really corralled this type of book/drama on film with DYNASTY and KNOTTS LANDING etc. I am surprised that is was considered a flop in the USA when a big hit elsewhere. My main memory is from a suburban cinema in Sydney....400 person sized crowd of couples.... then shocked silence during a bathtub abortion scene... followed immediately by (only) one huge athletic man staggering from his seat in a state of distress, dizzy from what he had seen, lumbering Frankenstein monster-style across the aisle, and ploughed headfirst through the plaster wall on the stairway to the foyer. The building shook and we ran to see what happened. There he was, head first through the wall, slumped in collapse, with frantic audience members trying to pull him, legs first, from the hole. He woke up and started crying: "Awww I didn't like that" he sobbed. We had to stop the projector, tell everyone that he was alright and re wound the film. "Aww don't show that bit again" he protested, so we didn't, we re started from just after. With a mug of tea and his tears wiped up, we re sat him with his cringing date and the movie rolled on....and on and on. Just so you know...FROM NOON TILL THREE is a funny (!) Charles Bronson western with Jill Ireland.. equally as enjoyable 70s. No bathtub abortions but a good train smash.

I saw this movie upon the persistent recommendations of my lady co-employees thinking and hoping that there may be sense after all in their insistence. But of course, knowing them I expected this to be another chick movie, a maudlin love story.

To my surprise, it had a lot of suspense and I also appreciated the fact that it captured the ambience of the European countries that served as locales.

It did well in the Philippines. I saw it with a standing room crowd and it took me a while to grab a seat. But I doubt if it was well received in the US.

... but not as good as it wants to be. This sprawling drama plays out over a span of decades as it follows a pretty young Parisienne who is seduced and abandoned by an American flier, and who then marries into society with the non-specific purpose of either getting him back or getting back at him. Meanwhile the flier gets married and goes through various crises of his own. The production values are expensive and look good, but the script moves with languorous slowness and, despite some fashionable 70s-style sexual frankness, everything has an old-style Hollywood feel to it, as if the movie had been made 20 years earlier than it was. John Beck and Susan Sarandon in particular seem to have been time warped back to a Ross Hunter melodrama such as Back Street, making their performances seem out of date for the more naturalistic 1970s cinema. Marie- France Pisier emerges as the best thing in the movie, but it's a pretty dull affair otherwise, especially when she is not on screen. Sarandon's career survived this bomb, thanks to Atlantic City a few years later, but John Beck, who was supposed to vault to stardom after this, quickly found himself in the hell of TV guest star shots.

Producer Frank Yablans and 20th Century Fox spent some serious cash on "The Other Side of Midnight" filming scenes on location in Paris, Washington, DC and Greece. It certainly looks good on screen. The lush musical score by Michel Legrand made the movie sound more important than it really is. (When is a Legrand musical score not lush?) But the plodding epic WWII romantic story about two women who are in love with the same pilot, adapted from the best selling Sidney Sheldon novel, should not be taken too seriously. The movie is so soapy, I'm surprised Procter & Gamble did not co-produce the movie.

Marie-France Pisier tries her best to flesh out (pun intended) her character of Noelle, using her body to get to the top. But the scenes with Sorrell Booke as a businessman who bought Noelle from her father, Christian Marquand as a filmmaker and Raf Vallone as a Greek tycoon, were rather embarrassing and I did not feel any sympathy toward her character. John Beck fared even worse as a very uncharismatic, two-timing cad.

It is interesting that after "Midnight", Pisier (who I remember from a much better movie from two years earlier, Cousin, Cousine) went back to appearing in movies in her native France and Beck continued to appear in soaps, this time on television.

Somehow, I thought Susan Sarandon fared best because she was the best actor of the three leads. I felt more sympathy for her character Catherine than Noelle. And what has happened to Sarandon after this trash-fest? Can someone say a thinking man's sex symbol? (Oscar-winning performance as Sr. Helen Prejean in "Dead Man Walking" notwithstanding.)

Why a 5 out of 10 instead of a 1 or 2? I remember reading many negative reviews when it was first released in 1977. However, unlike what was reported in the IMDb Trivia section, the movie did have a long run in theaters and was a moderate success at the box office. Even though I was very leery of the film's 2 hour, 45 minute length, I caught the movie on cable TV. This movie is like a trashy summer novel, I could not put this movie down. Without giving the ending away, the plot twists almost made the film worth my time. Having seen the movie several times in the past few years, The Other Side of Midnight is a bad movie but I plead guilty to admit that it is so bad, it's good.

Update (5/10/2007): I tried to re-watch this movie and ended up fast forwarding through the boring parts. I guess my original review was rather generous.

If you cut down the "getting to know you" musical montage scenes, the transition scenes where people are walking from one beautiful scene to another and delete the gratuitous nude scenes, it might have been better. The movie is also filled with script exposition and not enough actual scenes that might have made the movie more interesting. The scenes between Pisier and Michael Lerner, who plays an investigator trailing John Beck's character, are especially deadly.

Sarandon's performance still holds up. She exudes more depth to her character than the script allows.

I sense that the movie was made by some dirty old men whose idea for a "chick flick" was to see the main female characters naked. A naked male lead? Not a chance.